Friday, September 8, 2006

where the hell have i been?

jesus.

so i was going to write first about my experience at a paul simon concert.

as always, the concert was excellent, and as always, the crowd was pathetic. simon crowds are passive, just sit there and clap. they don't get up and dance or have a good time. it's sad. of course, in this venue, the concert nazis were out in force actively preventing people from standing up, so that didn't help. this is the second time i've been to an event here where this happened, and i won't go to that venue again.

but of course life got in the way. So I haven't taken the time to update the site the way I should have. But now I have some good shit to talk about.

School: I finished the summer semester with a b in microeconomics, and an a in business law. That brought my GPA up to almost 3.3. The semester went by very quickly, and I'm glad. Two more I don't have to take.

For the fall on taking two classes again. This time I am doing "interdisciplinary process," which is essentially a research course required by my academic department. Well, it is required for new students who joined the program on the 2006 catalog. Since I am on the old catalog it is not required for me, so I am taking it as an elective. Last spring, I took the first of the three "interdisciplinary studies" course is, called "interdisciplinary perspectives." Essentially it introduced what interdisciplinary studies are and a little bit about how to do them. We used a single class topic, global warming, as an exercise in how to do this. (Lots of people thought we were studying global warming, and they totally missed the point. the class was about how to think from multiple perspectives, which is very difficult for some of these people.) I got an a in that class, and enjoyed it a great deal.

This time we are doing suicide terrorism as the class topic. We won't have to do a complete paper basically without instruction at the end of the course, like we did last time. This time we will do it in pieces, and groups, over the course of the semester. Again, I'm having a fantastic time in this course.

the other course I'm taking is the psychology of women. I haven't decided whether or not I like the instructor, but I can tell already I do not like the book. From what I can tell, the book is all about how the differences between men and women are caused by men subjugating women, men abusing women, men objectifying women, societal pressures on women to conform, and so on. So far, it seems to be a man-bashing book.

work: work remains incredibly challenging, and the boss can be difficult at times. I suppose he is like any boss, but that doesn't make it any easier, especially since he is in Australia with all the naked women, and I'm here.

He came to town at the beginning of August and we decided to move our shipping operation to me. So now I have custody of all 9000 copies of our DVD products, and when we get an order in, it is my responsibility to ship them out. We don't get many orders in a week, but we hope to start a retention program using them, so we expect that the volume will increase significantly.

As part of this effort, the boss agreed to rent me in office again. So I rented a place less than 2 miles from my house. Because of the nature of my work, I obviously don't discuss it in public a lot, and I deliberately omitted the fact that I work for Novell website. So I'd been in there three weeks when they handed me an eviction notice for running a sexually oriented business. Never mind, of course, but I don't have any walk-up customers and that as long as they keep the door closed nobody has any idea what I do in there. Nope, not good enough, get the hell out right now. So I packed all my shit, including the 9000 DVDs, put most of it in a mini storage shed, and moved the office of the structure back home. Since I had just gotten into the groove of working at the new office, having to tear it down and move everything back to the house has been a major disruption for me, my work pattern, and my family. It has been extremely frustrating.

So I am trying to run a new office, and this time I'm being more upfront about what I do. I found a great place that will work very well, but it is owned by some big national corporation, and while local management doesn't have any problem with me doing what I do, I asked them to write me a letter saying that they know I run an adult DVD warehouse, and as long as I don't have walk-up traffic and make it a retail shop, it's okay with them. But of course the local people do not have the authority to write that kind of letter, and the people who do have that kind of authority either do not want to write the letter or do not think my business is important enough, so I have been waiting a week to hear from them. I am moving on with my search because I don't have time to waste. fuck them. I offered to prepay six months in advance, and apparently that's not good enough.

dave: I went to see Dave in Dallas, and had a fantastic time. I also bought tickets to the Rolling Stones in El Paso in October, and Dave is the opening band. I expect to have a fantastic time there too.

I have also gotten involved in a fan tape trading site called dreaming tree, a reference to a song title. Dreaming tree, along with other sites like ants marching and etree (which features more than just dave), allow tape and recording traders to reach each other in a logical use of the internet for this sort of stuff. Now instead of trading crappy cassette tapes, you can pick up digital lossless recordings of your favorite shows, sometimes the morning after they happened.

White trash: I've talked before about our occasional white trash weekends. Sue and I had another one tonight and had an absolutely fantastic time. we started the evening with dinner for me at a steakhouse (since she had had spaghetti with the kids and was not hungry, but I slept through dinner), and moved from there to the vodka bottle that she had tucked into her purse. She nursed the bottle while I drove.

She needed a touch up on her fairy and moon, and not quite on the spur of the moment (we'd been talking about getting together with her since the dave concert in mid-august), i met someone i'd like to introduce to you ... her name is nancy.

click to enlarge

That is the dave matthews firedancer logo. although she looks all red, that is only because of the skin irritation. That picture was taken only 3 1/2 hours after the tattoo was put on, so it is still very raw. The color is actually a gradient, with red at the feet to Orange at the middle, ending with yellow at the hands. I had it put on my upper left shoulder, so that would be covered by a T-shirt. But, of course, when I go to Dave show, I will roll up the sleeve (maybe even pin it up). The image is shiny because I took it myself (shooting your left shoulder with your right hand is a bitch), and because it's covered in antibacterial ointment. I will post another picture when the color has had time to settle down.

No, I do not have plans for any more tattoos. Sue suggested I put Boyd's name below Nancy, because of course she knows that he is my hero, but I decided to pass on that. (anybody who can jump up and down on stage while playing a violin has got to be good.)

after the tattoo parlor, of course the next place we needed to go was the titty bar, where sue got so horny (and so drunk) she threw up.

So, there you go. That's what's up. Nothing, and everything, as always.